The demo has one really good scene, when the shot down bomber scratches over the ground. Nice grass and stuff. The rest ist kinda … well dull. They use plenty of post processing for DOF effects, which essentially means everything looks like upsampled from low-res (or quincunx, if you prefer). Quite demanding on the gfx card, but IMO not pretty, not at all.
The artwork itself is brilliant.
Unfortunately they seem to have been on a lets-strip-the-last-bit-of-functionality-from-the-freeware spree. Usability sucks big time. You can’t even look at your detailed results without registering with them. You can’t select which tests to run. You can’t select resolution for the benchmark and demo runs. Nothing. All it lets you do is save your results as an .rll, which is a zip archive containing two XML files, but the dialect is not documented and looks strange.
And it dared to fiddle with my file associations, I bet they had a reason for that
Short summary: what once was a cool demo troupe now went completely nuts.
Oh yeah, scene two is pretty much like Doom 3 from a technology point of view. Runs pretty damn slow too (single digit fps on a Radeon 8500, 9700Pro in the thirties or so).
It uses normal mapping to reduce geometry complexity and of course stencil shadows. IMO they didn’t make good use of the shadows (ie they do look correct, but they don’t add much to the overall visuals), but it’s interesting to look at. Their normal mapping seems to work very well.
[This message has been edited by zeckensack (edited 02-11-2003).]
[This message has been edited by zeckensack (edited 02-11-2003).]
[This message has been edited by zeckensack (edited 02-11-2003).]
Anyway, if you have anything less than a GF3, then don’t bother getting it, you can only see 1 ‘game’, and the fill rate test, and a sound test, and 2 others ones.
I think only the 9500/9700 can do all tests + all ‘game’ tests, until the GF FX comes out…
Sigh, I should have it in 12 hours according to the estimate. The servers are really getting hammered.
I’m trying to repair my kazaa installation now (probably broken by anti-spyware programs I like to run) but the installer is also a downloader. Heck kazaa will probably be a wash anyway, it’s almost never fast, even when I had some ungodly high karma on it it didn’t help.
Get Kazaa Lite dorbie. Adaware even recognises its dummy advert dll, and doesn’t remove it. Best way to get fast downloads on it, is to pick files with the most users… I can regularly max out my bandwidth on it.
Currently using getright, to switch between a list of about 8 mirrors… should be down in about 20 minutes…
I like the tests, but I’m really disappointed by the demo. Except for the first part of the demo, it’s just the tests + sound. Compare this to 3dMark2000, whose demo was -very- nice to watch.
This BitTorrent is nice but err… shouldn’t P2P networks like Kazaa do this anyway with the bonus that I can search? Damn. I wish there weren’t so many darned BW freeloaders and MP3s on the thing. There’s not even a single copy on Kazaa yet.
BTW, is there a searchable directory of bittorrent stuff or is it all just invisibly related to the original URL on the server?
whats this i hear about nvidia not being to happy with it + in fact aint gonna support 3dmark2003
cant say i blame them i downloaded 3dmark2000 (or 2001) a couple of years ago + was totally unimpressed (from a technical viewpoint even though others raved, i remember i was pissed off at the time cause it was a huge download )
aside from that even though the scenes might look like games they are in fact not games. give me quake3 (or doom3 when it comes out) Unreal2 benchmark figures anyday. a far more accurate representation of what the hardware actually does
2001 was pretty cool, the best up to that point, it’s still worth a download. It is ubiquitous in reviews. I’d be surprised if 2003 suddenly lost all that ground.
P.S. how about posting some results to this thread for various cards?
[This message has been edited by dorbie (edited 02-11-2003).]
Score: 4383
CPU: Athlon 2800+
GPU: ATI 9700 Pro with Catalyst 3.0
RAM: 1024 MB DDR 333
MOBO: Nforce2
It runs fairly well on my system except that the benchmark stutters horribly for me in everything except the air combat game. Any hints about how to get rid of this?
– Zeno
[This message has been edited by Zeno (edited 02-12-2003).]